Repsol Honda’s Casey Stoner leads first practice day at Valencia – MotoGP news
Repsol Honda rider Casey Stoner led the first practice day of Valencia GP at the Ricardo Tormo circuit, Spain. The season finale round will be held this weekend.
The first practice session of the day was held in wet conditions that held off many riders from posting their best lap times of the day.
Stoner said, “It hasn't been a great day to be honest, we've never had a great feeling here in the wet. I love riding this circuit in the dry, but there seems to be some sort of oil or grease on the circuit, I'm not sure if it's due to a lot of car rubber
down but it makes things hard for sure.”
However, the new MotoGP World Champion gave his best shot to record the top fastest lap time of the day, which was also held through the second free practice session in afternoon. The Aussie’s best lap time was 1:45.513 seconds on the wet tarmac.
The track was wet due to a brief rain shower. The track was not completely wet but rather slippery. Some rubber laid from previous events was also the cause for less traction on the tarmac.
The temperatures also were not in favour as the highest was 16 degrees Celsius in the afternoon. The track was wet throughout the day. It affected the rider to sort a proper race setting for their machines.
The 2011 World Champion added, “It's been pretty useless in terms of finding a good set up, both sessions began with a little water and then drying out towards the end, when it's like this you're chasing the set up all day so we didn't do too much work on
the bike.”
The Aussie rider added that the team tried few different things to improve the setup but the conditions did not favour him.
As the track dried up in afternoon, the settings sorted were a useless package for race which cost a lot of time on the final time chart.
Now Stoner and his team waits for the third practice session and hope it goes well under dry conditions. He also added that if it rains then it should be for the whole session so the settings can be reformed for wet track.
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